sabīl

Saleh Lamie Mostafa defines the term sabīl as “a road, or a path” coming from the verb sabala, “to let fall, drop, to let hang down, to close eyes or to shed tears” (1989). Mostafa  argues that the use of the term sabīl to refer to a building created for a public drinking fountain likely comes from its connotation of being a work done on behalf of god, sabīl li-llāh (ibid, 34). The connotation of the road is augmented in Ezba by being a gesture intended towards travelers or passers-by. As such, a sabīl is not only a gesture toward the afterlife but also a commitment to the wellbeing of one’s current community—“a bodily need met with a spiritual response,” as one resident of Ezbet Khairallah told me.

Creating and maintaining a sabīl gathers merits accrued with God in the Islamic tradition. Those merits, or ḥasanāt, can be shared by all who help to maintain the sabīl, and they are often passed on to a departed loved one through a dedication. Sabīls offer a unique socio-material object in which the themes of this text come together. Sabīls condense within themselves the diversity of material forms, practices of care and repair for clay and metal water infrastructure; the embodied notions of smell, taste and temperature; a shifting history of social responses to a material context of hardship; and practices of neighborliness that draw on religious traditions to shape the livability of urban neighborhoods.